Monday, 31 October 2016

Early reviews suggested Ava duVernay's documentary follow-up to her much-admired breakthrough feature Selma was going under the title The 13th. Now that it's reached its ultimate home on Netflix, we can see that that title appears on screen as the far starker 13TH - a reference to that crucial amendment in the Constitution that defines who, in the quote-unquote land of the free, actually gets to live free. duVernay's using her newly bestowed stateswoman role to critical ends here, parlaying the success of her previous project into an extended inquiry into whether or not the Civil Rights Act with which Selma finished wasn't, in fact, something of a false dawn. The stats are damning: here's a film that questions how, at the tail end of the Obama administration, America arrived at a situation where a country boasting five percent of the world's population could have ended up jailing a quarter of the entire planet's prisoners, the majority of those black.

The opening stages thus function as a primer in race relations since the Civil War, whisking us through the lowlights of The Birth of a Nation - that blockbusting exercise in racism that enshrined a certain idea of the African-American in white consciousness - to arrive at the Klan, segregation and that late Sixties moment where the panicked powers-that-be reacted to the growing turmoil on the streets by inscribing suspicion, paranoia and outright prejudice into law. duVernay and her co-writer Spencer Averick show how - like capitalism - the phenomenon of mass incarceration only accelerated under the ultra-conservative Nixon and Reagan administrations: from 350,000 prisoners in 1970 to double that by the mid-1980s, reaching 2.13m by 2014. That figure surely wouldn't have been allowed to creep that high had the policy been a lossmaker; clearly, at some point, someone realised it was possible to make big bucks from keeping people behind bars. (The film's Netflix stablemate Orange is the New Black has dramatised this very issue over recent seasons.)

To any British viewers wondering what this problem has to do with them, I'd first say a) how very parochial of you, and then b) as is generally the way with culture and policy alike, what starts in the US is often carried via geo-economic current to the UK. (Seek out this summer's The Hard Stop for further information.) In 2016 of all years, we should all feel a chill of recognition entering the room during the segment that outlines how Nixon realised he could reach out to poor white voters with openly racist imagery and rhetoric; as several survivors of that moment attest, when you create a context in which one group of people is afraid, another group of people often wind up in the garbage pail, or on the bonfire. Some of these tactics clearly aren't going away - a lamentable situation only underlined when the film begins to explicitly address the contenders in the current US Presidential race.

Inevitably, Donald Trump's heavily harrumphed thoughts on the Central Park Five case are called back into question, yet duVernay and Averick also call out Hillary for using the loaded term "super-predator" in an early 90s speech on crime, and they venture that her husband only reached the White House after deploying tougher rhetoric than his opponent George H. W. Bush in a bid to win over conservatively minded floating voters. Bill's "three strikes" policy is cited as one of the main reasons the number under discussion has skyrocketed since the millennium, jailing so many (without the possibility of parole) for relatively minor infractions. (It's a sign of just what a topsy-turvy year this has been politically that the Caucasian senator who emerges with the most credit from duVernay's interviews is the veteran Newt Gingrich, who admits it was racist for Congress to push for punitive measures against the - predominantly black - users of crack, when those of oh-so-white cocaine, doubtless including some key Washington staffers, were being let off with warnings.)

The result is one of those umbrella docs that usefully rounds up and digests the themes and arguments of a decade's worth of engaged non-fiction - films like The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and The House I Live In - while seeking out pockets of new and valuable material. duVernay draws a very persuasive line between Jim Crow-era lynchings and the recent spate of shootings involving unarmed young black men - where a different weapon has been deployed to bring about the same oppression, written into the very fabric of American life as business as usual - and she draws out a series of revelations on the mysterious group known as ALEC (the American Legislative Executive Committee), a cabal of corporate interests convened to write overextended congressmen's bills for them, including that which engendered the controversial Stand Your Ground loophole by which George Zimmerman was exonerated for killing Trayvon Martin.

All of it packs a punch, yet much of 13TH's potency lies in the film's stitching: in Averick's own hands, this is a most sharply cut documentary, weighing point against counterpoint in mini debates of a rare clarity and perspicacity, and working recent footage of the Democratic primary debates and footage of black protestors being shoved around at Trump rallies into a 100-minute single-sit briefing. duVernay may be responsible for the additional layer of pop-cultural savvy: the lyrics of songs by key black voices, from Paul Robeson to Public Enemy, provide their own damning commentary on a history we see repeating itself. Will 13TH have any impact beyond the sitting room? Well, who knows: at this point in 2016, you fear anything might happen. Still, this hellyear would have to outdo itself if a film this combative yet accessible and eloquent didn't resonate in some way among voters and legislators alike. To paraphrase a lament raised around the time of Dr. King, a change is going to have to come - the question 13TH leaves us facing is when, and what form it will take.

Sunday, 30 October 2016

You've Been Trumped,
a very canny documentary by self-billed "freelancer" Anthony Baxter,
sets out the kind of anti-capitalist resistance it's hard not to get
caught up in. Some time around the turn of the millennium, Donald Trump
vowed to develop "the greatest golf course in the world" on a previously
unspoilt stretch of the Aberdeenshire coast. Planning permission was
initially denied by the local council, who had serious sustainability
and environmental concerns, but the plans were called in by the newly
independent Scottish parliament, who - with an eye to job and wealth
creation - overruled the decision.

What
Team Trump hadn't counted on up to that point was the appalled reaction
of those local residents whose homes fell prone to CPOs (compulsory
purchase orders) when the deal went through, and were - understandably -
less than delighted at the prospect of having to give up parts of their
land so that a bunch of zillionaires could fly in to play a few holes
and go back again. Anyway, into this stand-off trumps Trump in his own
private jet, his "hair" indistinguishable from the long reeds blowing in
the wind, first tossing promises of employment and riches to these
paupers, and then going on the offensive, bawling out anyone who dared
to stand their ground, and labelling their homes "slums" and "pigsties",
trumpety-Trump.

Part
of Baxter's project here is to take the viewer into these homes, and
show you what a warped idea of filth and poverty Trump has. Sure, these
cosy farmhouses are hardly Trump Towers, but they're the bedrocks of
good, hard-working, genuine people, with history and roots that are
evidently worth more to them than any number of billionaire's cheques.
The farm of Michael Forbes - the most vocal of the holdouts, dismissed
by Trump as living in "disgusting conditions" - becomes as much a site
of resistance as the steps of St. Paul's during the Occupy protests,
with one barn converted into a makeshift gallery to showcase the
anti-Trump works of a local artist. (His crazy golf-inspired
installation, where visitors are invited to putt balls into Trump's
looming, all-devouring maw, proves especially popular.)

Baxter's
methods are simple, sometimes obvious, yet almost always effective:
footage of the locals - who extend not just to farmers, but a former
manager of The Clash and the ferocious academic David Kennedy - is set
to stirring Celtic music and interposed with scenes from Bill Forsyth's
enduring movie touchstone Local Hero, filmed up the road, which
serves as a reminder of a better class of trans-Atlantic collaboration.
By contrast, it's clearly not hard to make Trump appear like some
swaggering Noo Jersey thug, not when he sets his minions to switching
off the holdouts' water and electricity supplies, sends the local police
round to rough the filmmaker up, and is caught sleazing over Miss
Scotland; the tragedy is that he almost doesn't have to worry, given the
number of friends he has in high places, impressed by his wealth,
seeking his patronage. (Worse may be to come: Trump's son and heir would seem to be an even bigger
shit, one who doesn't even have the comedy hairpiece to mitigate against
the inherited peacocking and contempt for those less well off than
himself.)

What
follows is an object lesson in bad planning: as the diggers move in and
the dunes are ripped up, we begin to see the effects this astonishing
arrogance has on the landscape, with householders receiving invoices for
work the Trump contractors have carried out. (In what's surely the
biggest slap in the face to the area and its politicians, those
contractors are Irish, not Scottish: as Trump himself barks in one of
his countless, godawful reality shows: "Get it done, and don't spend a
lot.") What keeps you buoyed, and gripped, is that everything the
businessman does - each glib public appearance and huffy-puffy TV
interview, every covert landgrab - has a galvanising effect on the
opposition; we gather that resistance, like a golf course, can be built
and sustained and fortified. You've Been Trumped would make an
excellent rallying tool: it makes you sad, then angry, and then
determined, if not to overthrow your chosen oppressor, then to at least
pull that fucking rug off his head.

(October 2012)

You've Been Trumped is available to stream on Netflix, and to buy on DVD here; a sequel, You've Been Trumped Too, opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

An unimpeachable megahit in
its native Korea, Yeon Sang-ho’s horror-thriller floats a delicious premise –
zombies on a train – delivered on several times over. Its pleasures are as much
logistical as visceral: after a biotech leak, our hero – callow financier Seok
(Gong Yoo), shepherding a young daughter towards an estranged wife – is
confronted by the old Southern Rail problem of how to navigate entire carriages
of violently enraged shufflers (one hint: luggage racks). Making his
live-action debut, Yeon – who animated 2011’s memorably grim The King of Pigs – stages thumping
close-quarters action, but also manages numerous deft, affecting manoeuvres
with characters drawn from a cross-section of Korean society. We’re bound for
an extraordinary railyard finale that involves seemingly half the country’s
population and a living-versus-undead dust-up atop a runaway loco, yet Yeon
keeps us guessing until the nervy closing seconds. It’s a delayed arrival, but
here, finally, is the summer blockbuster for which we’ve all been waiting.

From the controversy, a movie emerges. A Diwali release from
superstar Hindi director Karan Johar was always likely to attract column
inches, yet Ae Dil Hai Mushkil has
landed more than anybody anticipated: India and Pakistan’s latest impasse has
made Johar’s decision to cast Pakistani actor Fawad Khan the hottest of
hot-button topics. Threats of suppression were met by a video message in which
Johar sheepishly confessed he’d misread the national mood and, like many
colleagues, pledged not to hire Pakistani creatives in future – an industry
climbdown some found disappointing for coming so soon after last year’s
bridge-building megahit Bajrangi Bhaijaan.

What’s odd is that the movie itself turns out not to be some
incendiary provocation, but squarely Bollywood trad, a globetrotting weepie
unlikely to offend anyone but the most entrenched. This is the tale of Ayan
(Ranbir Kapoor) and Alizeh (Anushka Sharma), Hindu and Muslim respectively, who
meet as barhopping students in London and bond over 80s film references and
philandering other halves. Over several years, the pair tour the continent,
twirling from Parisian café to Viennese nightclub, Ayan’s burgeoning singing
career shaping the narrative, Alizeh’s DJ ex (Khan) standing between the pair
becoming anything more than just good friends.

Johar’s insider status ensures the film never lacks for
dazzling distractions: fun celebrity cameos, leads with a nice, bickering
chemistry. Sharma’s terrific spikiness – neatly captured in Alizeh’s cacti
fetish – draws something more resilient out of Kapoor’s generally drippy
matinee-idol persona: it’s Ayan’s story, ultimately, that of a big kid forced
to grow up the hard way. Yet everyone’s solid work gets undone by a clumsily
handled plot turn that suggests a failure of nerve around the central
relationship. The real interloper’s name isn’t Khan, but cancer, which proves
as deadly for the movie as it is for any of its characters.

A wider problem at this stage may be separating film from
furore. The movie’s message is that Hindus and Muslims can happily co-exist.
The message its maker issued last week suggested that this may not in fact be
possible in the India of 2016, which – even before the chemo kicks in – renders
the film’s questing optimism tentative at best. You can’t entirely blame Johar,
who’s seen his glossy bauble kicked around as a political football, but his
backtrack does feel like an acknowledgement of this project’s essential
fragility – that, however polished its pieces and players, it stood no chance
upon encountering harsh reality.

Thursday, 27 October 2016

I bailed on this franchise a month or so before those planes struck the Twin Towers, so I'll keep this relatively brief. I can only surmise that the huge popular success of Bridget Jones's Baby, and its generous critical reception, has something to do with a residual fondness for that stable Working Title world full of nice, white, heteronormative types whose aim in life is to land well-paying jobs in the media before settling down with someone of a similar shade. (Ladies and gentlemen, here is the one sector of the "liberal elite" that doesn't find itself demonised in 2016.) As the title flags, the aspiration third time around extends to procreation of a sort. The central question here is whether Bridget can see herself bringing new life into the world with one of two suitors: a pearly toothed dotcom billionaire (Patrick Dempsey, a touch cutprice for the role), whom Bridget meets while glamping at a music festival headlined by Ed Sheeran and a David Dickinson lookalike (they couldn't even get Dickinson); and Colin Firth's Mark Darcy, the human-rights lawyer who's grown only more constipated with age, such that he now resembles a distant relative of Charlie Higson's Ralph in those bucolic Fast Show sketches. (Dude's so uptight it's a miracle he's capable of ejaculating anything other than steam; our gal's obsession with this tombstone-straight dullard is a mystery another fifty Bridget Jones movies couldn't explain.)

As for Bridget herself, she continues to be rubbish at everything - dithery in love, terrible at her job, barely able to stand upright at the best of times; in her now-digitised diary, extracts of which are flashed up on screen at regular intervals, she's cretinously prone to substituting the number zero for the letter o, which left me even more worried for the child - making this one of the few romantic comedy franchises to be aspirational about everything but its heroine, and yet we're still meant to be nice around her, I think, and cheer her accidental successes. (Is this that feminism everybody's talking about nowadays?) Somewhere deep down in the pallid DNA of this latest entry, I could detect stirrings of a regional variant of Trainspotting's coruscating "It's Shite Being Scottish" monologue - an entire film cursing the crapness of being English (the awful music and awkward dancing; the inherited sexual cringing; the lousily limited choices in work and love), but all of the above elements have been reframed as essential parts of a raucous girlie-night-out celebration: what Bridget Jones's Baby has to say for itself, ultimately, is that It's Great Being Shite and English.

Director Sharon Maguire chops up an already patchwork script, multiply rewritten over several years (hence, presumably, Dickinson), and flies its "highlights" into the audience's gaping maws like a mother playing aeroplane. Not one but three Sheeran songs! Jokes about - or, at least, references to - The X Factor and hashtags! Some random men getting their bums out! C'mon, you know you like this! I bet you even like the scene at the "London Media Show" where Bridget mangles the polysyllabic name of the one non-Caucasian performer (the terrific stand-up Nick Mohammed, who deserves better than this) to have been granted a speaking part, don't you? Don't you? Look: "Gangnam Style"! We are presumably hellbent as a society on getting to experience Bridget Jones's Hot Flush and then Bridget Jones at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and I wouldn't doubt for a second there would be an audience for those films, but that audience should be very careful what they wish for: once Madame May finally gets round to invoking Article 50, every British movie will be bound by law - good old English law, drawn up by sexy English lawmen like Mark "The Spark" Darcy - to look and sound exactly like this.

Monday, 24 October 2016

If Central Television had been entrusted with an episode of The Hip Hop Years - doubtless hosted by Grandmaster Tony Francis - it might have turned out something like NG83: When We Were B-Boys. The NG of the title is the Nottingham postcode; '83 the year in which the breakdancing craze first took hold among rival crews on the Midlands city's streets, as it did elsewhere. If the interviewees in this engaging indie documentary - a joint effort by Claude Knight, Luke Scott and Sam Derby-Cooper - are to be believed, the scene at Rock City's weekly Saturday Afternoon Jam was not a million miles away from the more strenuous and frenetic activity dramatised in West Side Story.

The filmmakers catch up with this scene's main players, now in their forties and beyond, several still clinging to their original boomboxes. There's Shane Meadows soundalike Karl, presently a postman who has to get up at a time he once used to come in at; there's Barry, a.k.a. Audiotron, a treasure trove of information located bodypopping in a bedroom overloaded with collectibles, from era-specific mixtapes to the casings of household burglar alarms; and there's Tommy, whom we learn has fathered 14 kids, and who doesn't so much rock or drop the mic as talk it into a state of exhaustion. Representing the erstwhile homegirls is Annie, a.k.a. "Lady McD", whose story is underpinned not by the nerdy facts the guys proffer, rather some altogether painful emotions.

In the main, though, the tone is fond, relaxed: Knight, Scott and Derby-Cooper believe, not unmistakenly, that you can learn as much about someone from how they make cups of tea for the camera crew - or from the very fact they make cups of tea for the camera crew - as from any subsequent sitdown and chinwag. These are characters you'd happily spend a couple of hours down the pub listening to - which may be one reason the film keeps orbiting certain Notts hostelries - and they keep producing amusing, diverting anecdotes between them: a fraught excursion to give a breakdancing demonstration in Beirut, a domestic dispute over a patch of lino (essential streetdancing kit) belonging to an ebullient soul known to everyone as "Dancing Danny".

A little more structure or focus on the competitive nature of British breakdancing arguably wouldn't have gone amiss, but the filmmakers have unearthed a wealth of VHS footage to plug some of the gaps. These now grainy, wobbly images not only commemorate specific locks and pops - a competition-winning one-handed headspin inspires awestruck reminiscence - but a particular moment in UK street culture, both faraway and so close: a point where was a British Home Stores (bearing its full name) in every shopping precinct, where our youth traded in packs of Bensons and Classic bars rather than bitcoins and snark, and - just perhaps - where there existed a community spirit that has subsequently come close to extinction.

The cautionary second half considers how these once highly flexible individuals have come to negotiate the years since, and while the Karls of this scene have committed to family and full-time employment (with a little DJing on the side), others have clearly struggled to fill their Saturday afternoons: petty crime, heavy drinking and chronic loneliness begin to enter the frame. B-Boyism suddenly starts to resemble as much a paradise lost as those Northern Soul nights held just up the road at the Wigan Casino, for what ultimately reunites the film's subjects is a tragedy - albeit one reframed as a celebration upon the selection of the right, evocative tune. In the end, we're left to conclude this was just a passing scene - which is why West Side Story became a classic, and Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo never did - but it's been documented with affection and sensitivity here: the same affection and sensitivity a Barry or Tommy would surely reserve for a white label 12", or the right pair of trainers.

2014’s Ouija, a
rapidly forgotten exercise in crash-bang-wallop horror, was chiefly of note as
a business proposition, born of that deal struck between Michael Bay’s Platinum
Dunes outfit and boardgame nabobs Hasbro to convert the latter’s products into
movies. Still, it was cheap enough to turn a profit on wide release – $103m on
a $5m budget – and so, this Halloween, we’re offered a prequel that claims to
fill in some of the devil board’s backstory. “The spirit world is
unpredictable,” its phoney occultist heroine Madame Zander (Elizabeth Reaser)
informs us. The movie business, as we know very well, is not.

For all that, Origin of
Evil – directed by Mike Flanagan, the emergent talent behind 2011’s unsettling
Absentia – does just enough to climb
over the low bar of expectation. Granted, there’s nothing new about its premise
– fake psychic learns a lesson about messing with the dark side – and Flanagan
has to resort to a 1960s milieu, all kinky boots and intermittent “groovy”s, to
distinguish his film from the 1970s-set Conjuring
series. Single mom Zander seizes upon this new toy to jazz up her act; what she
doesn’t expect is for her youngest Doris (Lulu Wilson) to become an altogether
amenable host for passing spectres.

Flanagan’s been sent on the movieland equivalent of a coffee
run here, so you can forgive him for amusing himself as he goes: dusting off
the old Universal logo, reviving those cigarette burns used to alert
projectionists to reel changes. If nothing quite matches Ti West’s retro
exercises (House of the Dead, The Innkeepers),at least Flanagan’s trying. Yes, he works his soundtrack over, but
with co-writer Jeff Howard he sets so much weird narrative running – mom’s
thwarted relationship with priest Henry Thomas, unresolved paternity issues,
Doris’s overnight grasp of Polish – that he doesn’t have to rely on loud noises
to grab the attention.

Arguably he’s caught trying too hard. The final movement
doesn’t tie matters up so much as spiral further outwards into schlocky
incoherence. Still, that’s one way of upending formula: this time, the Ouija
itself seems a minor player, less obligatory product-placement than a
springboard for ideas, both wayward and workable. It’s still no scarier than
any other branded content, and perhaps only the most lukewarm slumber party
would truly need it. Yet if you were
to ask whether Origin of Evil offers
a better quality of timewaster than its predecessor, my finger would hover
inexorably over the YES option.

Wednesday, 19 October 2016

Having been cast out of the profitable summer season after 2010’s costly flop Knight and Day, Tom Cruise has since been busy imposing himself upon the Boxing Day slot with films that bear the credit “Tom Cruise in a Tom Cruise production”. Last year’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
just passed muster, but 26/12/12 brings us the trickier proposition of
Jack Reacher, based on the Lee Child bestseller One Shot. Cruise
may very well have presented the project to Paramount as their
opportunity to match Fox’s inexplicably successful Taken franchise – and
you can’t help but think that series’ towering lynchpin Liam Neeson
would be more immediately convincing as Child’s six-foot-five
ex-Special Forces op than the still-boyish, smirking, unavoidably tiny
Cruiser.The change of title necessitates a full twenty
minutes of exposition, in response to the early question “who is Jack
Reacher?” Some familiar answers come in. He’s a maverick, by all
accounts, who doesn’t trust authority and simply refuses to play by the
rules; he’s apparently built like the proverbial outhouse, and harder
than Sean Bean
on steroids wielding a titanium mace. Then on walks Top Gun, sniffing
around a sniper attack in downtown Pittsburgh that has left five
unrelated people dead, and rather undermining the build-up.Christopher
McQuarrie, making a comeback of sorts sixteen years on from writing The
Usual Suspects and twelve years after directing The Way of the Gun,
makes something queasily compelling out of the initial attack, viewed
through the sniper’s crosshairs, before cutting around the death of a
mother who dies shielding her child, either to secure the 12A rating or
appease viewer sensibilities in the wake of Sandy Hook. Still, this is very much a Tom Cruise
production, and the level of control being exercised is often
unintentionally hilarious.

Reacher’s introduction involves a lady
emerging from his rumpled bedsheets and redressing herself – that’s
right, folks: he’s a lover and a fighter – while every other scene
features a bevy of young women batting their eyelashes at him, from
casual bar pick-ups to Rosamund Pike,
reduced to wide-eyed breathiness as the D.A.’s
daughter-turned-damsel-in-distress. One of her encounters with Cruise
showcases the most gratuitous display of male toplessness outside of a Twilight
movie – though this show of star muscle gets objectionable whenever it
asks the girls to stand round cooing at Reacher beating another of his
foes to a pulp.Just when you think the movie can’t get any campier, out of the shadows steps a one-eyed Werner Herzog
as chief villain The Zec, who apparently chewed off three of his own
fingers in a Siberian prison camp to avoid losing them to gangrene. A
weirdly passive antagonist, sitting around in the background while his
minions get on with the real dirty work, Herzog has no business being
here save to make the cinephiles slumming it in the back rows of the
Odeon chuckle; still, maybe the paycheque will help fund his next
expedition, and future Jack Reacher sequels will see Cruise facing off
against Bela Tarr or Michael Haneke.Like
so much about the Cruise career, everything is played insistently
straight, yet the star’s steely determination to reassert his own
stardom, his own overpowering masculinity, leaves us with an
invulnerable hero who’s just impossible to root for, and whose
relentless, sub-Arnie wisecracks get very tiresome very quickly. It
doesn’t help that all the eye-gouging, woman-beating and incidental
racism makes it an uncomfortable 12A, at best – even before you factor
in the gun fetish that leaves the film looking dodgy indeed in the light
of recent events. Maybe the Boxing Day crowd will indulge Tom
one more time – but I’d seen enough of Jack Reacher long before the
utterly generic final shootout, which isn’t a terribly good sign for a
putative franchise-builder. In Cruise’s iron fist, Child’s filling pulp
has been reduced only further: to over-extended nonsense.

(December 2012)

Jack Reacher is available on DVD through Paramount Home Entertainment; a sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday.

About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).